Monday, December 3, 2012

flawless battle-stones

spent a few hours leveling pets in valley of the four winds this weekend. along the way, i picked up three family-specific battle-stones - the kind that can only be used to upgrade pets of a particular family. (note that this contradicts the patch notes, which said family-specific ones only came from battling tamers.) since the valley is full of critters and aquatics, that's what i got. it's kind of unfortunate that the pets most needful of upgrading, because they are really rare and therefore hard to farm for a rare, are also the ones hardest to get a battle stone for. yes magic i'm looking at you - willy needs an upgrade! (apparently you can also get a general purpose battle-stone from battling wild pets, but the odds are super low.)

anywho, when you get one of these stones, the way you use it is as follows: (1) summon the pet you want to upgrade. (2) target the pet. (3) right click on the stone in your inventory. a little clunky, but at least it works. since rare critters and aquatics aren't too hard to find in the wild, i ended up using my stones on quest reward pets that have a distinctive, if not unique, look. so war pug the perky pug, commodore bob the fishy, and peanut all got the goods.

got some traffic from folks looking for the polished battle-stone vendor. you can buy them from commander lo ping in townlong steppes - he hangs out in the niuzao temple, out in the islands. i'm not feeling any need to buy these myself - as many rares as i have at this point, paying to make a pet uncommon is not appealing. but not everyone is me, so if it fits your plans, then rock on.

i'll tell you what i know. it looks like i did a little under 200 battles. my teams were typically two level 20-24s, and one 25 that i only brought in if things went badly. the wild pets were 23-25. whether or not this meets blizzard's definition of "defeating higher level opponents increases the chances of obtaining a stone", i got no clue. not even sure if "higher level" means higher level than you, or higher level in the sense that 24 is higher than 3. i'm pretty sure, but not 100% positive, that i got stones from fights where there was no rare. i'll keep an eye on that though, and see if i can nail it down one way or the other.

my guess is that the probability of getting a stone is somewhere in the ballpark of 1%, give or take, which would mean we need to do north of one thousand battles before lady rng is no longer in the driver's seat. lucks to you!

I have gotten three of these from leveling around Halfhill. I didn't notice any pattern, but I would guess I have fought at least 200 since 5.1. I think it is just plain old luck (or lack of) because I got general flawless ones twice, one family specific, and then a family specific from the daily quests.

I just upgraded a L20 Emperor Crab to Uncommon, from Poor quality. I think this will be a useful time-saver for those of use who a) have nowt else to spend the points on and b) who have a number of hard to find spawns at below Uncommon. My Mininfernal, also Poor, will be my next upgrade :D The question then becomes if I can upgrade these with the next stone up.

I so wanted a Flawless Battle-Stone and finally got one but didn't realize the angst it would cause, lol. I am still trying to decide who gets the upgrade. My head tells me to upgrade a Magic but my heart wants to upgrade my Kun-Lai Runt.